I Failed.

I made a promise (aka: goal) to you, and to myself, that I’d give you at least one blog post every month.
Welllllll as you can see, it’s been a minute.
Actually it’s been roughly 7.4 million minutes. True story, I did the math.

Back to the gut-wrenching, guilt-ridden, failure thing…

I would start a blog post, alot of them in fact, and would never finish it because, it just wasn’t right. It wasn’t good enough. I’d tell myself I didn’t have time. Or, just sit and scroll Pintrest in an effort to pretend I would cook a meal. Either way, the result was the same – I didn’t do it. And the guilt and shame continued to mount on my shoulders.

Then I started throwing some real shade. My internal shit-talker really got going and it sounded something like this “seriously, why do you even set goals because obvi you’re not going to do it” and “you’re actually not even a good writer so maybe it’s best you aren’t making other people read your crap” and “you suck” – that kinda shade.

Then a month would pass. And another. Then another. And another…
After a while, I quit.

How many times have we quit on ourselves? How many times have we told ourselves we’re not good enough?How many times have we thrown away a “start” because it wasn’t perfect?How many times did we fail?

Since I know my people, and you’re all a bunch of damn perfectionists, I’d say the answer to this is: Far. Too. Often.

Here’s the stupid part: none of it is true.

There is a difference between quitting, and resting.

Don’t stop, just slow down.
Just because you need to refocus doesn’t mean you gave up. It just means priorities shifted and you adjusted accordingly.
We’ll never be perfect. Ever. It’s not for lack of trying! But last time I checked, we’re all human and humans mess up.
Write yourself a Human-Hall-Pass, kick the dirt off your boots and get your sweet-ass back on the right track.
What if every time you fail you ask yourself what you learned? Didn’t Thomas Edison “fail” a million times (roughly) before he got the light bulb to work? I don’t know about you but I’m pretty freaking happy he kept trying.

What’s your light bulb? What did you try and quit too soon?

So here I am. Imperfect. Guilty. Human. But, I’m trying and it’s a start.
Sometimes starting is the hardest part.

I’ll publish this post without re-reading and re-writing 10 times. I’ll probably publish it with a spelling error (can we just agree that’s spell-check’s fault, not mine?). It may or may not ever get a pretty photo because who really cares besides me and the Insta algorithms. Guess what – the Earth will likely keep spinning without the unnecessary time I’ll spend trying to make it perfect. I doubt people will love me less because spell-check didn’t catch that spelling error. And maybe, just maybe, somebody needed to hear this today. Maybe somebody needs to know that it’s ok to fail.

In other news, my goal of eating at one new place each month is TOTALLY on track for the year! 😉

Stay tuned for the 2018 edition of Epic Shit. The “rest” over the last few months has been pretty epic.